Would it be better to Start Over vs doing a Website Migration?
-
Hey guys /gals
I have a question please. I have a computer repair business that does extremely well in search and is on the front page of google for anything computer repair related.
However, I am currently re-branding my company and have completely redesigned every aspect of the UI and the SEO Site structure as well as the fact that I have completely written vastly different content and different title tag lines and meta descriptions for each page.
So basically when doing a migration we know that we want to keep our content, titles, headlines and meta descriptions the same as to not lose our page rank.
Seeing that I have completely went against the grain in all directions on a much needed company re-branding and everything is completely different from the old site is it even worthwhile 301 redirecting my old urls to the new ones that would (best) correspond with the new?
In the plainest English, would I do better at Ranking the New Website QUICKER without doing 301 redirects from the OLD to the NEW?
In an EXTREME instance like what I have done, would the Domain Migration IMPEDED me ranking the new site seeing how nothing is the same?
I have build a Rock solid SILO Site Architecture on the New site which is WordPress using the Thesis Framework and the old domain is built on JOOMLA 1.5
Thank fellas
Marshall
-
Hey thanks Keri and how are you?
-
Moz has recently had a little bit of experience with a rebrand, changing domains, changing URLs, implementing redirects, and a variety of other fun things to keep us busy. Ruth Burr, our in-house SEO, is giving a Mozinar that talks in-depth about this migration on Thursday, with a chance for you to ask questions at the end. If you're not able to attend the webinar, we'll have it online for download within two days.
You can reserve your spot at http://moz.com/webinars, as well as see all the past webinars we've done, and what else is scheduled in the future.
-
Hi Marshall,
one resource I think is very valuable regardless of if someone is new or have been doing it for long time this is a great search engine optimization is this guide please do not think that I am giving you this because I think you are a beginner I know you are not. And I agree with you Google has made things kind of nuts in the last 3 to 5 years.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
It is definitely the right place to start if you are just picking up after a couple years off.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks gents and figured as much.
I had to ask though. Although I am very good at SEO and coding and everything else, that means moot if you are not current with the recent GOOGLE drama that has been punishing everyone for the last 2 years now.
3-5 years ago, I could build a site and rank it on the first page for pretty much everything without even doing any back link building but...once again.. we are talking 5 years ago when things were a lot different and a lot less harder too.
Never hurts to ask the folks that do this stuff for their primary source of income know what I mean fellas?
Thanks once again to all of you for your responses to my question.
Sincerely,
Marshall : )
-
Just like the 2 suggestions, it's really best to keep both sites. Move forward with the new site and re-brand your company but don't scrap the original website. Add a banner, write up, some news explaining the re-brand and point the original site to the new site. You'll create a backlink and if the person is genuinely interested in what you have to offer, they'll follow to the new website.
301 any page that are relevant from the original site to the new site. If both sites have a products page then you can point it over. Google will naturally figure out what you did and start passing any relevant benefits to the new site.
-
Hi Marshall,
You're rebuilding your current website in WordPress using thesis framework. And you're asking basically if you you should do 301 redirects or not?
Absolutely you should do 301 redirects if you want to keep any part of your rank which sounds like it is doing pretty good. I would feel when redirect every page to the new page that has taken it's place. Also for word press I would strongly recommend using manage WordPress hosting
WP engine, zippykid, web synthesis, and Pagely are excellent choices.
I hope I've been of help,
Thomas
-
Please...dear God don't scrap your website (especially if you are ranking well for it). Even if the content is completely different, figure out where to redirect your legacy pages to and use 301 redirects. Just make sure that you are doing one to one redirects to maintain as much of your link equity as possible. Sorry for such a short and simple response to your long question, but this only required a simple answer. If you are offering the same products or services create a massive .htaccess file and redirect the hell out of your old site.
You owe me a Coke.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pagination new pages vs parameters
I'm working on a site that currently handles pagination like this cars-page?p=1 cars-page?p=2 In webmaster tools I can then tell ?p= designates pagination However I have a plugin I want to add to fix other seo issues, among those it adds rel="prev" rel="next" and it modifies the pagination to this cars-page-1.html cars-page2.html Notice I lost the parameter here and now each page is a different page url, pagination is no longer a parameter. I will not longer be able to specify the pagination parameter in webmaster tools. Would this confuse google as the pagination is no longer a parameter and there will now be multiple urls instead of one page with parameters? My gut says this would be bad, as I haven't seen this approach often on ecommerce site, but I wanted to see what the community thought?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Migrating 1 page to https
Hi there, Although we do plan to migrate our entire site to https, we currently have only one page on our site which we want to migrate to https, as it has passwords and wotnot on it. Lets say it is httpS://www.example.com/login/ I am not really sure how to go about migrating just one page though.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk
I am guessing that we need to: make sure that httpS://www.example.com/login/ is the only page that exists on httpS:// replace any link to the httpS://www.example.com/login/ version on the http:// version remove httpS://www.example.com/login/ from the http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml create a httpS://www.example.com/sitemap.xml on httpS:// which only references the one page (httpS://www.example.com/login/) 301 http://www.example.com/login/ to https://www.example.com/login/ submit both sitemaps to Google so they know whats up. fetch http://www.example.com/login/ so that google finds the redirect. Anything else?? :S Not too sure about this one. Many thanks for your help.0 -
Very strange HTML docs - what should I do with them through site migration?
I've just been looking at a website and it includes numerous web pages with addresses like this. I click on the URL and it takes me to a fully functional web page (not an image) and when I run it through Screaming Frog this comes up as an HTML page. The site has around 150 unique pages and over 450 pages like this one - how should I deal with these pages during an SEO migration (only a few are backlinked to)? I look forward to reading your thoughts. http://www.[companyname].co.uk/property/caravan-sleeps-4/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/images/cottageTypes/blank.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Internal Linking for better seo
On our site http://villasdiani.com we have a blog called Kenya news, which is a category where we regular post articles. I am always creating external links to the category Kenya news so as it would pass juice to the posts in it and the posts have back links to category. There are no internal links among posts in the category. As our main target is to rent beach villas and boutique hotels, each of that posts in the category Kenya news has only a link either to category with beach villas or to category with boutique hotels. My question is, if this is good practice?, is it just not too much links going to categories to beach villas and boutique hotels form the Kenya news?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca1
Thank you very much for any thoughts Iris0 -
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code?
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code? http://naturespremiumpestdefense.com/ Thanks, Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ULTRASEM0 -
Changing website providers
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Website Is In Tables
Our website www.accupos.com is mainly created with TABLES, which I've heard is a practice from Neanderthal times. Nevertheless, it is my job as the new Dir. of Marketing to SEO the hell out of it. Would you recommend converting the ENTIRE website into Divs or changing the current Tables situation? Or is this not a big deal for SEO? The site APPEARS fine, but I want to get our keywords ranked as well as possible, putting my time in the most efficient places (like link building!). How much of a high priority might this Tables fix be? We are also running an AdWords campaign spending LOTS every month. Please Moz me! Derek
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DerekM880